Category Archives: Toxic work environment

Is it okay to spy on your employees?

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Hey guys! I’m on vacation and trying to unplug (YEAH RIGHT) from the Webs this whole week. I thought I’d share a few previous posts for your enjoyment. Catch you on the flip-side.

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While less than 10 percent of companies now are monitoring employee use of social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and others, that is likely to change over the next few years.  Gartner predicts that 60 percent of companies will be monitoring how their employees use social media by 2015.  Employers are interested in monitoring the posting of comments from employees about the company.  Companies say they monitor employees for reasons such as brand management, sentiment analysis and reputation purposes.  Oh and let’s not forget that social media checks are often  run on candidates before job offers are made.

The week I was heading to SHRM12, and since I was part of the official “HR Blogger” team, I was receiving mass emails from HR Tech companies hoping to connect with me at the conference. One of the folks that contacted me represented a tech company that helped employers monitor social media in house and they were trying to sell me on the idea from an aspect of monitoring “employee productivity.”

I didn’t buy it and I told them so. They of course, came back with several bullet points of continuing to try and sell me on the whole shabang and I told them I would give them a few minutes of my time to hear their viewpoint, but then I was so busy at the conference I just plain forgot. My apologies, if they’re reading this.

Snooping on employees is not a new thing. I used to work at Zales corporate where I was a collector who sat in a room of 120 or so collectors. We had certain daily quotas that had to be met and our phone conversations were constantly being monitored by our employer. I’m sure their reasons were the same as those today with social media and monitoring – to make sure our employees are productive. The thing about it though is that our numbers spoke for themselves. I was top collector for several months, and yet my calls were still being monitored. I was bringing in the revenue, but I was still being treated like I wasn’t.

What this did to all of us was create a sense of sneakiness on the part of our managers and it started to affect how we did our jobs and how we felt overall, about our company. It decreased loyalty and engagement and created a crappy working environment.

IMHO, if you are having to spy on your employees you have a greater problem at hand.  Perhaps you have control or trust issues yourself, and it’s affecting your team and creating a culture of distrust and disloyalty and you should seriously consider revamping your strategy.

With every employer trying to figure out the whole social business thing, there is a tech company out there trying to come up with a way to monitor that. I get that. That’s how new business comes about. And the process of monitoring employees is becoming easier as increasing numbers of surveillance products and services are available which allow companies to keep tabs on their employee internet activities.

Andrew Walls, research vice president at Gartner, said that “The growth in monitoring employee behavior in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services.  Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards.  Security monitoring and surveillance must follow enterprise information assets and work processes into whichever technical environments are used by employees to execute work.”

The National Labor Relations Board has also publicly declared a policy that employees should have the right to be able to engage in online discussions about work conditions and even complaints about their employer or working conditions on social media.  A recent NLRB statement said that “the NLRB has filed unfair labor practice charges against employers who have social media policies that the NLRB felt might be construed as ‘chilling’ employees’ rights to engage in concerted activity.”

John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, said that actually much of what is discussed [in the Gartner report] is unwarranted snooping in people’s personal lives.  There is no valid reason for it and companies that engage in such activities should be called out for their unethical activity.”

What’s your take on the whole snooping thing? Do you think it’s ever okay to spy on your employees?

Photo Credit: KosMedia

It’s not Social Media that’s killing productivity at Work

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I don’t know about you but I’m personally sick of hearing all the hype associated with the loss of productivity debate as it regards to Social Media and whether to allow it or not in the workplace. The reality is that your employees are already using Social Media at work even if they’re hiding under their desks with their smartphones to do it.

How about we try and think creatively as to how to incorporate it and use it to our advantage and business initiates? Sound like a plan?

Last month I presented at SHRM’s Work-Flex conference here in Chicago and my session was titled “Gaining a Competitive Edge in a High Tech World” and you can download that presentation on my SlideShare, if you feel the need.

In the presentation I made mention of the fact that it’s not Social Media that’s killing productivity at work, it’s other things such as email. It was noted that we’re spending 2.5 hours a day sorting, reading, and deleting emails that is just one of our productivity killers. I wish instead, someone would just kill email. I despise it. I mean, I really hate it. It’s such a time-waster and buzz-kill.

Incorporating the use of technology at work is a no-brainer and should instead be looked at as “keeping up with the times.” We’ve dealt with technology at work for years now with fax machines, even email and the use of computers and as we all know technology rolls in and out at the speed of light. By the time you buy that brand new HD TV and get it plugged in at home, the newer model is already on the shelf. That’s just a fact.

Social is changing how we do business, not only how we communicate.

So what are the real time wasters and productivity killers at work? Take a look at this Infographic:

What do you think about this? Do you have anything else that you’ve noticed that’s killing productivity that you’d like to add?

Thanks to the good folks at Compliance and Safety for the fun Infographic.

Photo Credit (TOP) SawPedia

Halloween office parties gone bad

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Some few years back, when working in the third level of hell, my boss and HR / Office manager thought it would be a great idea if several of us from the office got together and celebrated Halloween. She set the time and place for us to meet and told us we all had to dress in costume and head to one of the local bars in town.

We all thought that rallying the troupes and trying to create some kind of camaraderie in and out of the workplace would be a great idea, at the time.

So there was a buzz of excitement for the next few weeks throughout the office talking about our costumes and how much fun we were going to have at the party. We talked of what we would sing at karaoke, who we were bringing to accompany us, it was going to be “the shiznik.” We also discussed how we were not going to drink that much because we all knew that was never a good idea, and to act civilized which we all agreed was crucial being out with our supervisors and coworkers – God only knows what would happen if we didn’t. We laughed at that thought, and all agreed.

Time came and we all met up in our lovely costumes as we congregated outside the local pub awaiting our perfectly planned evening.

And then things changed………….

Once we walked through the doors, somehow that plan we had conjured up of not drinking too much and maintaining some sort of self-control went to #$%@. People were drinking more than their body weight, dirty dancing on the floor with their boss, and some things I saw reminded me of  an episode of “Girls Gone Wild.”

What happened to the plan? We seemed to have good intentions to begin with but with all the Halloween hooplah, something happened. We all lost our marbles.

Guess what happened on Monday morning? People were walking in the doors with their eyes towards the floor in embarrassment. They had behaved so badly that they couldn’t look any of their co-workers in the eye. They had lost the respect of those around them, and might I add – we all lost respect for each other and especially our managers who too, behaved badly.

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Abusive Bosses and Bad Marriages

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Here is a previously written post I thought I’d share. I’m still recovering from #ILSHRM12. Enjoy!

Years ago, after going through my divorce of eighteen loooooooooong years of marriage, I felt I wanted to leave my job, pack up and move somewhere new. Somewhere where no one knew me or my husband or his mother (God rest her soul – no, she’s not dead yet).

See, I am from a small town of about 70,000 people which not seem that small but had the mentality of Mayberry. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

So while at my current position in the travel agent industry, I started looking for jobs online – which was totally a new concept and not like looking and applying for jobs online today. I came across a position of Executive Assistant to the President of a company, which encompassed all of my previous experience including making travel arrangements.  It was also a lot more money than I was making in my current position. So I applied for the position via fax (I know, old-school) and then was contacted for an interview.

I headed over to Jacksonville, FL for the interview (about a 3 1/3 hour hike) and met with them, fell in love with the office manager and met with Owner/President of the company. He seemed normal enough and it appeared they hired me on the spot. I can honestly say I felt like I had my game on because I was preparing for what I was going to do once the divorce was finalized.

After the divorce, I moved to Jacksonville and started my new job. I was totally stoked to be having a new start! A new life in a bigger city where I knew no one – it felt as if my slate was wiped clean.

About a month into it, I started seeing warning signs. The lady who was the office manager started hitting on me indirectly (my first sexual harassment from a chick) and my boss was literally out of his mind. He would be the nicest guy one minute and then the moment things did not go his way would yell and scream at me. It felt like being right back in the middle of my bad marriage.

I remember one day I had booked his flight and made sure to have a limo driver there at the airport to pick him up and take him on his way – and something happened where the limo company dropped the ball and no one was there to take him to his important meeting. Now I’m sure he could have taken a cab and mentioned it later but instead, called me and reamed me a new one.  I did confront him later and told him I did not have to take that kind of abuse from anyone, much less him and he apologized but somehow, I knew it would happen again.

So I had a few choices (just like with my bad marriage). I could continue putting up with it, suck it up, continue being abused and make it work. Or, I could start looking for something else there in my new place of residence . Lastly, I could head back home with my tale between my legs feeling like a failure and move in with my parents.

Neither of these sounded like great options for me and I tried looking for work there while I continued to take the abuse but nothing happened. So I went to the office manager and my boss and told them that it really was not working out and I was moving back to Alabama. Can you believe they gave me 3 weeks severance pay? Go figure.

The end is in sight

In the end, I went back home and moved in with my parents until I could find something there in town in which I was able to do within a couple of months. I started as a Human Resource assistant and worked my way through the company which took me on a completely different path in my career.

It all worked out even though there were definitely some rocky places along the way. It all was a learning experience and brought me where I am today. But, I did have to make the choice.

I suppose I could have stayed in that horrible environment and put up with it like some folks do (and continue to complain about how bad they have it) just like I could have in my bad marriage.

But, like many others, I chose to move on and was the better for it.